State Dominance of a Circuit

Thank you for the opportunity to participate as a guest blogger this week!  In my first post, I would like to share some thoughts on a paper I discussed at the recent Midwest Political Science Association meeting in Chicago. The paper, Prof. Stephen Wasby’s “State Dominance of a Circuit: An Exploration,” (available on the conference’s archive at http://64.112.226.77/one/mpsa/mpsa07/index.php?cmd=mpsa07&id= ) provides an interesting comparative analysis of state and district dominance of circuit court law.  I suspect, moreover, that it might be of interest to some who regularly review the ELS Blog.

The paper is motivated by discussions concerning the possible split of the Ninth Circuit and the noted dominance of California in Ninth Circuit litigation.  Prof. Wasby provides an exploratory analysis of this dominance across multiple measures of the concept including the number of appellate filings originating from the state as well as its share of published and unpublished decisions, en banc rulings, and Supreme Court rulings.  What I found particularly interesting was the comparative approach employed; California’s dominance in the Ninth Circuit was compared to that of other states in other circuits including New York in the Second Circuit, Pennsylvania in the Third Circuit, Texas in the Fifth Circuit, Illinois in the Seventh Circuit, and Florida in the Eleventh Circuit.  Although some of the data across the above measures was limited to the Ninth Circuit, the descriptive study helped to place the issue of California’s dominance in perspective.  The paper also included a section on district court dominance as well, and it too was comparative in nature.

The paper, however, also raised a number of interesting research questions.  Implications concerning future divisions of the Ninth aside (which are important enough to justify taking an empirical look here with respect to California), as someone interested in analyzing the influence of circuit court law on circuit judge decisions, it does encourage one to think more deeply about the development of that law.  Consequently, this work can provide a point of departure for further analysis of the substantive implications of the fact that certain districts and states within a circuit contribute differentially to the cases that form the basis of circuit law.

Comments

[valtrex online]

I think That can be over time, between cases, whatever, and you may not be able to do much in the first stages of research, but you certainly should try to get a comparative element in the picture asap. thanks

[Tracy Lightcap]

Yes, it was an interesting paper, wasn't it? It's like I'm always telling the students: you don't really know what any set of data is telling you until you have some sort of comparative basis for your analysis. That can be over time, between cases, whatever, and you may not be able to do much in the first stages of research, but you certainly should try to get a comparative element in the picture asap. Steve's paper, by comparing circuits both over time and between cases, answers very nicely. And, consquently, comes to some very interesting and useful conclusions that (mirabile dictu) address a real policy question of some moment.

I said at that panel that the panelists were addressing the SLiMES of judicial politics. SLiMES (Subsurface Lithographic Microbial Ecosystems) are colonies of bacteria existing below the surface from about 50 feet to 2 miles down in the Earth's crust. They probably contain more than a million species of bacteria - biologists have identified about 1000 - and probably mass greater then all the biota on the surface. We have just started to look at the basic data patterns of court systems below high courts. We need to get busy; that's where the action is.